Various types of musical information displaying apparatuses capable of displaying a musical score in a better understandable appearance, i.e. in an improved layout of the notational symbols based on an automatic music performance data file. An example of such musical information displaying apparatuses is disclosed in U.S. Pat, No. 6,235,979 in which the length of a displayed measure and the allocation of displayed notes in the measure are properly adjusted so that the notes at different times should be displayed without an overlap between any adjacent notes. This patent, however, does not consider the chord names and the words to be displayed in association with the notes on the musical score.
Typically, a musical score describing musical information displayed along the time axis on a music score displaying apparatus contains chord names located near the musical staff to represent chords by a character string (sometime of a single character, and sometime of several characters). Usually, the left end (head position) of the displayed chord name indicates the time point along the time axis at which the displayed chord is to substitute the theretofore prevailing chord.
Under these circumstances, in the case of a chord name with a long character string such as, for example, the chord “C#M7aug” (C# major seventh augmented), the displayed character string may sometimes extend over to the display position of the next chord so that the chord names of the two chords might be partly intermingled to become illegible or hardly legible for the user. Further, in the case of a chord name with a non-root bass (often referred to as an “on-bass chord”) such as, for example, the chord “C on E” (C major on bass of E) or sometimes expressed as “C/E,” the tail character “E” indicating the bass note to be played with the constituent notes of the chord “C” may be confused with a new chord name, even though two consecutive chord names are not displayed overlapping with each other.
A musical score sometimes contains also words to the melody. In the case where the words are displayed in connection with the notes on the music score, the words are typically aligned along the time axis of the note progression and placed at the positions of the respectively corresponding note symbols. However, if the distance between the two displayed consecutive note symbols are too short, the two words may sometimes overlap in part with each other, just like in the case of the above-mentioned chord name display, and may be illegible or hardly legible.